"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." Orwell

"Men are so simple of mind and so dominated by immediate needs that the deceitful man can easily find those ready to be deceived."
Machiavelli

"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.." H.L. Mencken

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Almost All Has Already Been Said

There's so much to say, or maybe nothing more at all, about the horrifying, depressing events of the past week. It feels like the country is falling apart and that there's no solution. Each side blames the other, of course. To me the comments of Barack Obama have been a lot less divisive and hate-inducing than those who've called him a terrorist-lover, an America-hater, or those represented by this asshole. Our president's first words about Dallas were perfect, in fact; and so were his most recent. The right, of course, heard them as horrifying.

But that's not my point. My point is a small but more than half-serious one: the cop-killer in Dallas had, like so many "patriots" of the right, stockpiled a huge cache of weapons and ammo at his home. Those "patriots" do so, they tell us and themselves, to protect themselves and the rest of us against a tyrannical government. So, on that basis, shouldn't the cop-killer be a hero to them? Didn't he see himself as doing just that? And, in some ways, might his view of a tyrannical government be more justified than those of the "patriots," who consider it tyranny when they have to follow laws they don't like? Civil rights laws, for example?

For that matter, Philando Castile, the man killed by a cop at a traffic stop, was legally carrying the gun which, evidently, he didn't use but which was, presumably, the reason he was killed. Another citizen, armed as the NRA would have it, dead because of it.

I assume none of those America-loving, tyranny-preventing patriotic ammosexuals will see either situation that way. Their answers to why not might be instructive.

For The Sake of My Sanity

Some will know me from my other blog, "Surgeonsblog." Of late I've given over to frothing at the mouth as the world descends into stupidity, and our politics and our citizens seem, in numbers enough to be meaningful, unable to see it. So for now I'm leaving surgery writing behind, if for no other reason than to defuse and diffuse my unrelenting sense of doom, and with no expectation of making a difference. These are things that, to me, are obvious. Except that, apparently, they aren't.

RWS™

RWS™: For those who drop by here in the middle, and wonder what it means: it's my shorthand for Right Wing Screamers, which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few. Behold them in their unrepentant disregard for reality: the RWS™